Performance of political parties in the 2016 parliamentary election in Slovakia: regional comparisons and district-level determinants

This paper explores the results of the 2016 parliamentary election in the Slovak Republic, with a special emphasis on the regional aspects of participating political parties’ election campaigns. It summarizes the election results for the country as a whole, as well as separately by region. An empirical analysis of party electoral performance at the district level suggests that the incumbent Smer party tended to do well in districts with higher rates of unemployment and a lower proportion of university-educated population. Similar patterns hold for the Slovak ethnic nationalist Slovak National Party and the far-right People’s Party Our Slovakia. By contrast, the two parties that presented themselves as being starkly opposed to the Smer government’s policies—Freedom and Solidarity and Ordinary People and Independent Personalities—exhibit greater support in districts with more university-educated voters and lower unemployment rates.     

The 2016 Austrian Presidential Election: A Tale of Three Divides

The 2016 Austrian presidential election was remarkably different than the previous ones in the history of the country characterized by its stable political system. Not only did it open the role of president in Austria to debate, but it also sidelined the two political parties that had dominated Austrian politics since World War II. Alexander Van der Bellen won the election with one of the closest margins in recent history. This article argues that the election divided the country in more than one way. Besides the near 50–50 divide between the candidates, the results show that it generated important dynamics in territorial politics as well, notably in the states and cities of Austria. These results point towards a party system transformation in Austrian politics.     

新《企业破产法》管理人制度探讨

我国新《企业破产法》的管理人制度与原破产法律制度中的清算组在很多方面都有所不同,实践中需要予以正确把握。本文主要分析了管理人制度的实施规则,针对破产实践中存在的一些问题如管理人的能力与资质问题,提出作者的看法与建议。     

Through the Party Lens: How Citizens Evaluate TV Electoral Spots

Party affiliation is considered one of the most important factors explaining voters' party choice, but also a strong intervening variable when it comes to the effectiveness of electoral advertising. The question raised in this study is to what extent party affiliation explains voters' judgments of electoral advertising, which was investigated by using data carried out during the Swedish general election campaign 2010. The results show that party affiliation still functions as a filter when voters are exposed to electoral advertising. The findings are suggested to be understood against the background of cognitive dissonance theory and selective exposure according to which people try to avoid a state of cognitive dissonance by avoiding information that conflicts with their attitudes.     

党内选举：一个必须重视的问题

党内选举是党内民主实施程度的标志,它保证党的各级组织内部权力来源的合法性 ;形成党内有效监督以规范党的各级领导班子和干部队伍建设 ;保证党员民主参与党内事务的管理。针对党内选举中存在的问题 ,应改革和完善党内选举的各项制度来保证党内选举的真正实现     

The Interface between Western and Indigenous Signs in Zanu-PF Advertisements for July 2013 Elections

ABSTRACT

Political contestation in Zimbabwe post-2000 has been largely acrimonious. In the electoral domain of the epoch, political advertising, has been one of the key tools through which this contestation took place. However, these advertisements have been barely studied and those that have made an attempt to study them did not examine them from advertising theory and/or sign theory perspective. The study argues that locating the analysis of political advertisements in advertising theory and sign theory presents an opportunity to gain insights into how political products gain sign value, exchange value and utility value. The study deploys advertising theory and sign theory to examine the value that selected indigenous and Western signs used by the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) invest in the political products: ZANU-PF and Mugabe. By interrogating four purposively selected signs in ZANU-PF advertisements for the July 2013 elections, I seek to establish how political products are produced as signs and signs as political products. The selected signs are subjected to semiotic analysis. The findings show that ZANU-PF's use of these valorised Western and indigenous, often contradictory, signs is designed to appeal to votes on the basis that it is a democratic, divine anointed, Christian and African-oriented party.     

Do Terrorist Attacks Increase Closer to Elections?

The shadow of violence that elections cast remains poorly understood. A key obstacle impeding cross-national empirical analysis of electoral violence has been the varied nature of such violence. To address this challenge, I examine terrorist attacks as one particular form of electoral violence. By tracking the incidence of terrorist violence relative to election dates over time and across countries using an original dataset for the period from 2000–2005, I find strong support for the hypothesis that terrorist violence increases as we move closer to an election date. In fact, terrorist violence approximates a normal distribution centered on the election date.     

A party system in flux: the Swedish parliamentary election of September 2018

In the Swedish parliamentary election of 7 September 2018, the biggest parties, the Social Democrats and the Moderates, both lost votes compared to their scores in the previous election, but not as many as they had feared. Commensurately, the radical-right challenger party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), which had seemed certain to profit from Sweden's dramatic experience of the European migration crisis, did well, but not as well as it had hoped. The result left the array of parliamentary forces fragmented and finely balanced. Only after months of negotiations could a government be formed. Eventually, the incumbent coalition received a renewed parliamentary mandate. At the same time, the party system was transformed.     

Local campaign activity and voting

Two types of data are used to address separate but related questions about the 2011 referendum on the parliamentary voting system. First, a survey of individual candidates at the coincident local government elections examines the extent to which local campaigning was used by the parties (as surrogates for the 'Yes' and 'No' camps) to provide information and decision cues to electors. Second, aggregate data at local authority-level compares participation in and voting preferences at the two electoral events. The combination of evidence suggests that while having coincident local elections helped to boost turnout in the referendum, the impact of local-level campaigning on the referendum outcome was marginal at best.     

What explains regional variation in election fraud? Evidence from Russia: a research note

The December 2011 legislative election was among the most fraudulent national elections in Russia since the communist period. The fraud, however, was not evenly spread across the country. Precinct-level election returns from the 83 regions of the Russian Federation suggest that the level of fraud ranged from minimal or small in some regions to extreme in some others, with moderate to high fraud levels in many regions in between. We argue that in an electoral authoritarian context like Russia, regional variation in fraud can be explained by differences in (a) the perceived need by regional authorities to signal loyalty to the center by “delivering” desired election results; (b) the capacity of regional authorities to organize fraud; and (c) the vulnerability of citizens to political pressure and manipulation. We test the effect of signaling, capacity, and vulnerability on electoral fraud in the 2011 legislative elections with data on the 83 regions of the Russian Federation. We find evidence for all three mechanisms, finding that the tenure of governors in office, United Russia's dominance in regional legislatures, and the ethnic composition of regions are most important for explaining regional variation in electoral fraud.